More by Jeremiah Blondin

Once, in the world of that long gone to ashes, there was a tale, ancient even in that ancient time, of a dark academy of the black arts, the Black School. Beneath the land of Moorish Spain, countless corrupted men and women, bent upon mastery of the necromantic arts traveled afar, that they may enter into the pact of the school, the lucky even returned to tell the tale. Since the dawn of time humanity has sought to control the dark power of the psyche, and since the dawn of time, they have been consumed.

Last night, upon encountering Morpheus in the land of dreams, I was greeted with a vision of a bleak world that never was. It was with this fleeting glimpse of a land unseen, unknown, and, as of yet, uncreated, that a story was born. From the mists of the darkened layers of the psyche, from that baneful limbo of the unborn, the dark and hopeless world that Azrael DeNoir regretfully calls home begged to be set free. And through the wild etchings of a madman, it found its way into the waking world, into your mind, your soul, from the realm of those fears that arise only in the night.